WML - Entities

WML entities are to represent symbols that either can't easily be typed in or that have a special meaning in WML.

For example, if you put a < character into your text normally, the browser thinks it's the start of a tag; the browser then complains when it can't find the matching > character to end the tag.

Following table displays the three forms of entities in WML. Named entities are something you may be familiar with from HTML: they look like &amp; or &lt;, and they represent a single named character via a mnemonic name. Entities can also be entered in one of two numeric forms (decimal or hexadecimal), allowing you to enter any Unicode character into your WML.

Named Entity

Decimal Entity

Hexa Entity

Character

&quot;

&#34;

&#x22;

Double quote (")

&amp;

&#38;

&#x26;

Ampersand (&)

&apos;

&#39;

&#x27;

Apostrophe (')

&lt;

&#60;

&#x3C;

Less than (<)

&gt;

&#62;

&#x3E;

Greater than (>)

&nbsp;

&#160;

&#xA0;

Nonbreaking space

&shy;

&#173;

&#xAD;

Soft hyphen

Note that all entities start with an ampersand ( &) and end with a semicolon ( ;). This semicolon is very important: some web pages forget this and cause problems for browsers that want correct HTML. WAP browsers also are likely to be stricter about errors like these.